I have to tell you, I usually get at least a small chuckle out of the products aimed at women.  They all seem to assume we’re either mindless drones who don’t think about anything but having less bacteria in our lives than our neighbours (see the keyboard post below to see how that is working out for me), or that we’re so obsessed with our own bodily functions that we dream and converse daily on our freshness.

But the tables have turned.  Yes, Radox, the manufacturer of a men’s soap in the UK has decided that men are so stupid that putting ‘for men’ isn’t quite enough.  No, to let the guys know this product is really for them, they’ve actually gone all out and put penises on the packaging.  Perfect for the caveman in search of shower gel.

Not only are they penises, but they are ebullient, happy looking fresh penises.  In a cluster.  Umm.  Yeah… Come to think of it, maybe I don’t want to know what they’re selling here.

I used this shower gel once just to see what would happen.  It was pretty disappointing. 

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Yesterday I did something unusual: I looked at my keyboard.  Those of you who type as badly as you spell won’t understand that.  But then perhaps the 2 kewl people don’t read Bitter Women.  (After my last hiatus, I’m not sure anyone does, but that’s another story.)

So I looked down, and was completely ooked out.  I’m not a tidy woman, but I am clean, and I realised my hands were resting on something completely repulsive.   Exhibit A shows the keyboard after I’d cleaned the left side of it:

This is not the interesting part.  See I do realise that most people clean things all the time.   This is pretty much what I saw, except that my keyboard has more of a grey tint than brown (well after I cleaned it, anyway) but the lighting here makes it look like I took this photo in a darkened bar.

The rant comes in here:  I freaking hate digital cameras.  Oh sure they’re lovely and when you take pictures of your cruise to Florence, you get nice sharp images of the twisty roads and perfect skies.  But that all comes at a price: seeing a bit more of reality than you really want to see.  Case in point:

Yes, I was actually putting my hands on that… every day. No wonder I got sick last week. In fact, I feel a little nauseous looking at it now.

Life is not flattering at 10.2 megapixels.  I really don’t want to see my world in razor-sharp 3 point focus.  And I can do quite a lot of this reality-checking record-keeping with a rechargeable li-ion battery that allows me to take up to 520 shots in single-frame shooting mode.  Yes, now close-up facts can now be in my face all day long and recorded forever.

If the camera did this to my keyboard, you can only imagine what it did to my face.

I miss the days of fuzzy inexactitude… of flatterying distance… of polite need-to-know reality. 

I also realise, dear readers, that missing any type of days is a sign of getting O. L. D.  Girl-fren has always warned me that getting older ain’t for sissies.  I see it’s also not advisable for those with a weak stomach or an expensive camera.

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You know a lot of people say things like “The English Language is an Amazing Thing”… which, true, it is. I had a friend in college who was a Japanese playwright, meaning she was Japanese and wrote plays, not that she wrote Japanese plays… because, said she, she just couldn’t write good stuff in Japanese. Too structured. Too many rules. In English, you can just make shit up.

Which brings me to the point that although the English language IS an amazing thing, the people that speak it are just downright kooky, which I think counts for a lot more than the language itself. That’s like blaming the car for the accident and not the drunk who was driving it.

Here’s one example of said kooky behaviour: we say shit all the time that we have no clue what it actually means, or sometimes we know what it means, but don’t think about the words that make up the expression. A good example is “you can’t fool me… that’s the oldest trick in the book”. Unless you’re a whore, you probably don’t actually have a book of tricks, and even then I guess you’d have to be an old whore to have an old trick book, unless you inherited it from another old whore, in which case I guess you could be quite spritely. And even if you are an old whore with an old book with tricks in it, there’s really no accounting for why your old tricks would be fooling anyone. Except their wives, maybe.

Now let’s forget the whore for a second and assume there’s a book of dastardly tricks out there, designed for fooling people. Where the fuck is it and how do I get a copy? Because I’m telling you, I fool no one, and it’s starting to get on my nerves. Besides, the expression (that’s the oldest trick in the book) seems to imply that the oldest trick in this mystical trick book is somehow the worst, so I’d really love to get a hold of the methodology for some of the newer tricks…. some trick so tricky that no one has seen it before… except maybe the guy that wrote it in the book.

And who is the guy? The trick-collector-writer-downer-in-the-trick-booker. Because I’d like to find him, beat him up, and steal his job (and his book).

See… English speakers are a bunch of crack-heads.

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Last night hubby and I watched Stranger Than Fiction .  If you aren’t familiar with the plot, it’s about a guy who begins to hear a voice… narrating his life.  Turns out he’s a character in a novel, and with a few exceptions, she doesn’t tell him what is going to happen, but rather what has just happened or what he’s thinking, the way a good narrator would.  Then suddenly he hears “Little did he know, this would lead to his imminent death…”

Hubby rated the film somewhere between “watchable” and “compelling”, but not quite compelling, he was quick to add.  I suppose that falls in the category of “just a tad more than slightly interesting”.   (We use a complex scale in our house.)

Now I liked the idea behind the film, and have no trouble imagining this as possible, as ridiculous as it seems.  If it seems your life is too boring to be fictional, the “hero” in the film was a compulsive, awkward tax collector who counted how many steps it took to get everywhere and the brushstrokes he took when cleaning his teeth.  I’m boring, but at least my personality isn’t that painful.  So I qualify as character-worthy, at least on that front.

I think my problem is not my character, but my author.  She’s a real frickin slacker, and my life is probably stuck in the bottom drawer of her desk because she can’t decide where she wants the plot to go, so I’m not being properly narrated, which tells me why I don’t know what’s going on myself half the time.   Some people stress about wanting to know the future.  I’d be content to know what’s happening now.

My guess is, in fact, she’s probably taken some low-paying secretarial job where she ends up getting coffee for some overbearing, sweaty boss who doesn’t realise it’s not 1964 anymore.  She probably imagines writing plot notes that come to her in a flash of inspiration on cocktail napkins, and maybe even tells people that she does, and she probably carries a notebook with her for just such an occasion.  However… I think she’s deluding herself.  She hasn’t actually written a word in months, and doesn’t bother fantasizing about what she’ll wear for her jacket-cover photo anymore.

You’d assume that having created a character such as myself she’d be possessed with creative juices, or at least a nice mango squash.  However, she’s let herself get lonely and carved a rut, judging by the evidence at hand.

I’m not sure what one does to wake up their author, to say, “Pardon me, but life in your filing cabinet isn’t as stimulating as one might suppose.  Could we get some literary devices going please?”  Because I could use my narrator back, although I could gladly skip the the foreshadows.

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Ask anyone; I’ve done some dumbassed things in my time. Have been accused, at times, of being slick-as-a-weasel in explaining away heinous–albeit harmless and/or stupid–acts.  However, is it just me or does this guy take the Cake for Dumb-Assedness.

Darren Mack, 46, pleading guilty in Las Vegas in November to murdering his wife, and also accepting a judgment for attempting to kill the judge handling his divorce (after first insisting on his innocence): “I do understand … in my (current) state of mind that shooting at the judiciary is not a proper form of political redress.” [Las Vegas Review-Journal, 11-5-07]

What the HELL was he thinking? Does he mean, maybe, that being sorry should be enough for taking a shot at the Judge after he was found guilty of murdering his wife. instead of something reasonable like, oh, ”listening to his Higher Angels” and filing an Appeal to a higher court or, maybe, simply voting against hizonner when he next stands for re-election?

What do you think,  Bitter Readers?   Is it me? Or maybe this guy’s lock-and-load attitude reflects current stress management practices.  Nevermind! It’s prob’ly just me.

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